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REALNEO is building a suite of open source collaborative tools and capabilities

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Thu, 12/16/2004 - 12:39.

REALNEOâ€™s development strategy involves building a suite of
open source collaborative tools and capabilities offering our residents unique
value, whether for economic development and entrepreneurship or just good
quality of life. For example, we use the global standard FOAF (Friend of a Friend)
for user identification management, and Drupal for content management, and we
see immediate opportunities to enable free, effective VoIP (Voice Over Internet
Protocol), Video Conferencing, Rich Content Management, and more capabilities
all free and open source â€“ REALNEOâ€™s system engineering and unique value
opportunity is bundling together the worldâ€™s best such capabilities to give
people and organizations of our region the worldâ€™s best collaborative,
intelligent operating environment, for FREE. For example, the Dec. 15 Source
Forge newsletter mentions developments for providing effective open source
streaming media, ideal for City Club forums, Cleveland Institute of Music
performances, and REI presentations â€“ perhaps all hosted on the Ultra High Bandwidth
OneClevelandâ€¦

MediaFrame for
Mpeg-4, public preview released
MediaFrame is an Open Source streaming media platform in Java which provides a
fast, easy to implement and extremely small applet that enables over 97% of web
users to view audio/video content without having to rely on external player
applications or bulky plug-ins. MediaFrame does not require special servers,
software or programming knowledge. MediaFrame for Mpeg-4 has been in
development for several years and was released today for the first time as
public preview. The preview provides a full version of the software along with
sample video and implementation files. Mpeg-4 compatibility brings a wealth of
new feature to the fore such as time based tracking, which allows users to
track playback through a fully integrated JavaScript API and video smoothing
which acts to remove artifacts from the video stream. The technologies video
scaling algorithm is also much improved, allowing a user to increase the size
of the viewable screen by up to 500% that of the original movie file without a
significant loss in quality. Like the Mpeg-1 version before it, MediaFrame for
Mpeg-4 is extremely light weight at only 56kb making it faster to initialise
than both Real player and Windows Media Player. And unlike its competitors,
MediaFrame does not require a plugin on the client machine. MediaFrame for
Mpeg-4 is available now. here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122368&package_id=138035

Another significant opportunity from REALNEOâ€™s open source
initiative: informed computer users are abandoning the buggy Microsoft Internet
Explorer browser for the more desirable Firefox (Firefox,
the open-source challenger to market heavyweight Internet Explorer, has
surpassed 10 million downloads in a little more than a month since the browser
was released in November). Now, imagine fleeing the expensive and
buggy Microsoft Outlook/Exchange environment, and the lock-in of SBC, AOL,
Adelphia, Etc., and the free but abusive email services of the ilk of Microsoft
and Yahoo, which â€œreadâ€? your mail and sell your data to advertisers. There are
better solutions and they are open source and will enable REALNEO users to
establish free-for-life email service name [at] realneo [dot] org
that is functionally like Outlook and even hotmail, but without paying a toll
to Bill Gates or accepting their invasion into your privacy and the spam and
viruses they enable. Read about the open source alternative:

E-mail
expert: On dumping Outlook, Exchange & IE
Alternative messaging evangelist and visionary Julie Hanna Farris is gung-ho
about messaging on Linux and about Mozilla's Firefox browser. That doesn't mean
that the Scalix founder is telling every company to dump Microsoft's messaging
systems and browsers right away, but she thinks that moving in that direction
is often a good idea. As she says in this interview, about 50% of Scalix's
customers are dumping Exchange for Linux-based e-mail servers.

Which brings up some other tools of the open source trade.
Linux is the computer operating system gaining global domination (e.g. â€œThe New
York Stock Exchange announced its new TradeWorks trading system todayâ€¦ an
"Extreme Availability" system by IBMâ€¦ 3,000 custom made wireless
handheld devices talk to Linux-based workstationsâ€¦). Sunâ€™s Open Office does
about what MS Office does, without the $500 per seat MS costs, bugs and bloat.
Looking further over the open source horizon, Source Forge project registry
statistics this week find there are about 87,000 open source projects
registered, and they served over 8.3 million downloads totaling 1.2 billion Kb
in the last 7 days, showing you where the metal of the new economy is forged
today. REALNEO is helping lead this movement in Northeast Ohio and worldwide.

Need more convincing about the future of Information
Technology â€“ consider, also from SourceForge Newsletter, which also provides
RSS feeds to REALNEO and to which you can subscribe and access a feed (read
About NewsForge):

How
to get a job as a Linux administrator
If you ask Scot Melland, it's a good time to be a Linux professional. IT jobs
across the board are picking up, but Melland, the CEO of Internet career site
Dice, says Linux knowledge is a particularly hot commodity. Job postings on
Dice for Linux professionals are multiplying at a much faster rate than any
other skill set.

Getting
started with Bochs
What if you need to run your legacy Windows application on a Linux box, a Mac,
or a Solaris-based workstation? To make the equation even more interesting
throw in a few requirements -- add transferring old legacy accounting data over
the network, or using the backed-up data from a CD-ROM. And yes, you want to
keep the costs to a minimum. An open source project called Bochs may be your
best option.

Free
(and open) holiday greeting cards
Setting up an electronic greeting card site for your own purposes is easier
than you think. There are at least two respectable well-maintained
open-source-licensed applications that can help you get your holiday e-cards to
friends, family, co-workers, or customers this season. Sendcard and Penguin
Greetings can give you the bragging rights to say you run your own e-card
service.

All
this suggests a great project for REALNEO â€“ a free, open source greeting card
server featuring the work of local creative collaborators â€“ writers, poets,
artists and photographers â€“ the new Cleveland School meets the new May Show on
the Internet. Details to come soon â€“ visit REALNEO daily.